Method for capturing and recording high-definition video and audio output as broadcast by commercial streaming service providers

Abstract

Methods and systems for recording streaming audio and video by directing an incoming audio-visual stream to a discrete memory region serving as a virtual display. The virtual display is configured with a section visible to the viewer and a section invisible to the viewer, wherein a streaming video is hidden from the user's display under all conditions. The user's browser is pre-loaded with hooks to redirect the video portion of the stream to the invisible section of the virtual memory wherein a video capture tool specifically designed to interact with the hooks can now recognize each function call and intercept each frame as it is rendered in the GPU. Concurrently, the audio portion of the stream is remapped using an audio indexing application. The GPU framebuffers and audio sinks are multiplexed together and saved to disk. The file is immediately accessible for playback or copying.

We claim: 
     
       1. A method for capturing video, comprising:
 loading a shared-object library into a device's web browser, the shared-object library making a computer's graphics processing unit's function calls and the web browser's memory space accessible; 
 receiving through the web browser a video stream having video content and audio content; 
 decoding and rendering frames of video content through the graphics processing unit's function calls; 
 capturing rendered video frames; 
 passing captured video frames to a video capture tool; 
 concurrently remapping the audio content to an audio sink to create an audio stream; 
 synchronizing the audio content with the video content in the video capture tool; 
 multiplexing the video frames with the audio stream as they are rendered in the video capture tool to create a copy of the original video stream; and 
 saving the copy of the video stream to storage. 
 
     
     
       2. The method of  claim 1 , wherein the audio sink is independent of the device's active audio outputs. 
     
     
       3. The method of  claim 1 , wherein the incoming video stream is first decrypted and DRM managed before being remapped, rendered and saved to video storage. 
     
     
       4. The method of  claim 1 , wherein the copy of the video stream is compressed before it is saved to storage. 
     
     
       5. The method of  claim 1 , wherein a user can view a portion of the recorded video stream that is visible in a video player application while multiplexing takes place in the device's graphics processing unit.